CITY ROOM; A Suburban Life, Permissible Back Then

By LAURA NAHMIAS

Published: April 17, 2013

sixth season of “Mad Men” opened last week on AMC (see video below), it was December 1967 in New York City, and the fictional Henry Francis had landed a post as a top-level aide in the very real Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, after working as a political operative for Lindsay last season.

But wait, city history wonks wondered: Henry Francis, second husband to Don Draper’s ex-wife, Betty, lives in a gloomy mansion in Rye, in Westchester County, far from City Hall. How could a top aide to the mayor, even a fictional one, live outside the city limits and not run afoul of long-standing residency laws requiring city officials to roost where they rule?">

When the sixth season of “Mad Men” opened last week on AMC (see video below), it was December 1967 in New York City, and the fictional Henry Francis had landed a post as a top-level aide in the very real Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, after working as a political operative for Lindsay last season.

But wait, city history wonks wondered: Henry Francis, second husband to Don Draper’s ex-wife, Betty, lives in a gloomy mansion in Rye, in Westchester County, far from City Hall. How could a top aide to the mayor, even a fictional one, live outside the city limits and not run afoul of long-standing residency laws requiring city officials to roost where they rule?

The short answer: In 1967, New York had no residency requirement for city officials.

The longer answer is this: For most of the past 75 years, the city has indeed had a residency rule. The Lyons Law, enacted in 1937, required municipal employees to have lived within the five boroughs for at least three years before appointment.

But to fill staffing gaps, officials began carving out exemptions to the law, and by the late 1950s, more than half of municipal employees had been freed from its provisions, Ralph J. Caliendo writes in “New York City Mayors, Part 1.”

The city repealed the Lyons Law in 1962. And by the time of the Lindsay administration, the issue of where city officials lived “wasn’t even on our radar,” said Sid Davidoff, who served as an administrative assistant to Lindsay for seven years and is now a senior partner at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron.

“It wouldn’t even come to my attention that someone lived, say, in Nassau County,” Mr. Davidoff said. “As long as they were at work on time I didn’t care where they lived.”

In his bid to attract top-level managers, Mayor Lindsay hired many people from outside the city, said Jay Kriegel, who served as his chief of staff and special counsel and is now a senior adviser at Related Companies.

But as New York reeled from crisis to crisis, Mr. Kriegel said, the mayor’s inner circle “were all working crazy hours.” On many nights, Mr. Davidoff recalled, “we barely went to sleep at night, much less went back to a house.”

By the 1970s, a call grew for the city to revive residency requirements. A law passed in 1978 was struck down because it conflicted with state laws, a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Kamran Mumtaz, wrote in an e-mail. The city finally adopted a law in 1986 that compelled workers to live in the city unless they were granted exemptions or waivers.

In 2010, after the City Council loosened the residency requirement, Mr. Bloomberg signed an executive order requiring high-level officials, including first deputy mayors and deputy mayors, to maintain city residency. Not that they are obligated to spend every night here. Deputy Mayor Bob Steel has a second home in Connecticut. And in 2011, Stephen Goldsmith, then a deputy mayor, resigned after he was arrested over a domestic dispute with his wife at their home — in Washington.

Back on “Mad Men,” by the end of last week’s two-hour episode, it was January 1968. Before 1968 was over, the real Mayor Lindsay would face widespread unrest, including a teachers’ strike and a sanitation strike that left the city covered in garbage (the mayor declared the second half of the year “the worst of my public life”).

In the episodes to come, Henry Francis might be spending less and less time in Westchester.

This is a more complete version of the story than the one that appeared in print.

PHOTO: Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley) on “Mad Men”: a Westchester County resident in the Lindsay administration. (PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANK OCKENFELS/AMC)

sixth season of “Mad Men” opened last week on AMC (see video below), it was December 1967 in New York City, and the fictional Henry Francis had landed a post as a top-level aide in the very real Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration, after working as a political operative for Lindsay last season.

But wait, city history wonks wondered: Henry Francis, second husband to Don Draper’s ex-wife, Betty, lives in a gloomy mansion in Rye, in Westchester County, far from City Hall. How could a top aide to the mayor, even a fictional one, live outside the city limits and not run afoul of long-standing residency laws requiring city officials to roost where they rule?">